It is now believed that the half-human half-fish that washed ashore during Hurricane Ike was its successor the evolutionary chain! Dr. Carr is traveling with the mutant corpse to compare it against the Tiktaalik fossil.

Weekly World News will as always be following these groundbreaking updates.

09/16/2008 – A fish with human legs washed up on a Galveston, Texas beach late Sunday night and experts now say that hundreds or even thousands of similar creatures might be living in the depths of the sea!

That’s the word from Dr. Richard Carr, a marine biologist who performed an autopsy on the fish and said that even though it appears to be a freak of nature, it had a “fully developed female reproductive tract—and almost certainly gave birth to other creatures just like it.”

“When this thing washed up on the beach some people, including police, thought they were being made the victims of a sick practical joke,” the expert said in his report to newsmen in Houston.

“But this fish isn’t a joke,” he continued. “This fish is real. And unless I miss my guess, it was mature enough to have laid thousands of eggs before it washed ashore.

“That means that entire schools and colonies of these things might be existing beneath the sea, totally unknown to all of us.”

The mind-twisting drama reportedly unfolded on the morning of September 15, when a couple of emergency workers spotted the 5-foot 2-inch fish on an isolated beach.

“Somebody had the presence of mind to call the police,” said Carr, who has written several books on marine life and is considered to have one of the finest minds in his field.

“The officers who went out to investigate clearly thought that somebody was playing a practical joke but they protected the carcass and alerted my office just in case. My assistants and I took the fish back to the laboratory and we were stunned by what we found.

“Flesh removed from the creature’s legs proved to be almost identical to the flesh of humans, the exception being the presence of a waxy substance that protected the skin from contact with water.

“The body of the creature looks like a sea trout, and the internal organs were arranged in the fashion of an ordinary fish. The brain was slightly larger and more sophisticated than what you would expect to find in a fish, but we will have to take a much closer look at it before we’ll be willing to say that the creature was smarter than any other fish.

“It was dead when it washed ashore, most likely pulled up from the depths by Hurricane Ike,” he added.

Carr and his team have preserved the remains of the creature while they continue their analysis. They are also seeking grants to finance a search for other half-fish, half-humans, that may be in the area.

“We really don’t know what kind of life-forms exist under the sea,” said the expert. “And I think it’s time we found out.”